Chile's Ice Age Gomphothere Was Somebody's Dinner

The newest chapter in human history might be a dinner menu. Archaeologists working the drained bed of an ancient lake in central Chile have pulled out the skeleton of an Ice Age gomphothere, an elephant relative that stood about four metres tall, and the animal's cracked skull suggests its brain may have been on the menu.

The find came from Lake Tagua Tagua in Chile's O'Higgins Region, where a team led by Rafael Labarca, an archaeologist and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile's School of Anthropology, dug between late August and mid-September. They recovered a substantial portion of one adult Ice Age gomphothere, including a well-preserved humerus, and estimated the remains at roughly twelve thousand five hundred years old, according to a report by Mark Milligan in HeritageDaily.

The Ice Age gomphothere was a big, plant-eating proboscidean, a distant cousin of modern elephants, that roamed parts of South America during the Pleistocene and disappeared near the end of the last Ice Age. Some grew to several tonnes and fed on grasses, leaves, and bark, and their feeding helped shape the vegetation of the landscapes they moved through.

The detail drawing the most attention is the skull. It looks fractured in a way that suggests people broke it open on purpose, possibly to reach the brain. The researchers stress that further analysis is needed to confirm exactly how the damage happened. If it does turn out to be human work, it would be strong evidence that South America's earliest inhabitants were butchering the Ice Age gomphothere for food.

A lakeshore people kept coming back to

The Ice Age gomphothere was not alone in the ground. The team also found horse remains, burned bird bones, and stone artefacts, a combination that points to people taking advantage of a range of animals in and around the wetland instead of relying on a single species. Labarca said, "What we have found is, indeed, an association between abundant gomphothere remains, some horse remains, and many remains of burned birds, along with lithic material," according to HeritageDaily's report.

This season builds on a longer investigation. Researchers cut a grid of square test pits around the former lake in 2023, and two of the pits produced extinct animal remains next to stone artefacts. The team expanded the excavation through the 2025 and 2026 field seasons and uncovered a much richer deposit. Definitive radiocarbon dates for the newest material are still pending, but the researchers estimate this phase of human activity falls between roughly twelve thousand six hundred and twelve thousand four hundred years ago.

The pattern looks like repeat visits rather than one long stay. Three linked sites, Tagua Tagua 1, Tagua Tagua 3, and Tagua Tagua 1 East, are filling in a picture of groups returning to the ancient shoreline across a long stretch of time. Labarca said the evidence shows people "settled sporadically on the edge of the lake at the end of the Pleistocene," as reported by HeritageDaily. The newest trench sits near ground first investigated by archaeologist Julio Montané in 1967, which hints the archaeological landscape around the vanished lake is bigger than previously mapped.

What the bones change

The fragile remains were lifted from the excavation and wrapped in gauze and Japanese paper so they survive for future study. Tagua Tagua is one of several spots in Chile, alongside Osorno and Puerto Montt, where Ice Age gomphothere bones have turned up near signs of human activity. What sets this site apart is that it preserves both the extinct megafauna and traces of some of the earliest people known to have lived in central Chile. The dig runs under a project called Walking with Gomphothere, backed by Spain's PALARQ Foundation, and the 2026 season marked its fourth consecutive excavation at the lake.

The find also lands in a year when archaeologists keep revisiting old assumptions about ancient bones. At Göbeklitepe, researchers recently argued that erosion and landslides, rather than rituals, may explain bones scattered through the site's monumental buildings. The Chilean team makes a similar point in reverse: damage that looks natural can turn out to be human, and telling the two apart is half the work.

Beyond the cracked skull, the dig is reshaping how researchers read the whole site. Tagua Tagua is shifting from a handful of isolated finds into a broad landscape of human activity, used again and again by people who shared the lakeshore with the Ice Age gomphothere. For more from deep history, browse The Old World.